September 11, 2022

I watched 60 Minutes' story about the FDNY during 9/11, and was transported back to that day and its aftermath. I was teaching at Queens College, CUNY, that morning -- a course on Gothic fiction, of all things -- and during our mid-class break (it met once a week for three hours), one of my students entered the room and said that the towers had been hit. I asked her if she was serious, and when she confirmed that she was, I cancelled the rest of class, answered a few students' questions about assignments and such, and then exited the building and turned west...The news hadn't seemed real until I saw the huge charcoal gray funnel of smoke drifting peacefully above the southern end of Manhattan Island. The rest of that day was numbing. I wasn't able to get home to our apartment in the Bronx because all the bridges were closed, and wound up staying that night with my ex's mother and sister, watching the non-stop news coverage all afternoon and evening. The subsequent weeks were also difficult. I remember being afraid for a couple of weeks when the bus I took to and from the campus crossed the bridge between the Bronx and Queens, thinking that a plane might take it out while we were there -- completely irrational, I know. I remember a favorite student, a young Iranian-American woman, disappeared for a few weeks afterwards, then told me when she returned that things were hard in her neighborhood and she hadn't felt safe. I remember in the classroom in which that course met, a student pointing out a piece of graffiti someone had scrawled above the door: "Kill all sand n*ggas." She asked that it be removed, and I or another of my students did so. I remember visiting the Financial District a few weeks after 9/11, once the area had been reopened to the public, and how ghostly the streets and closed shops looked blanketed in a pale gray powder, and the lingering acrid chemical smell. That day in September, and the rest of that semester, fundamentally altered my approach as a teacher, and changed me as a person; and watching the footage of these public servants putting their lives on the line, and in many cases sacrificing them, and hearing the interviews with the survivors, the pain and resolve in their voices, was really difficult even two-plus decades later.